Border residue

Spaces of Migration, just published by Pavement Books returns me to the suggestion on this blog some time ago, and no doubt elsewhere, that the discussion of borders has a too easy conception of space. Borders can be aural, temporal, conceptual, and proliferating right here. Where? He-re.

The policy pronouncements of the border authority replicates authoritarianism across the body politic. The compliance of some with G4s or other privatised border tools makes border agents of us all.

Abject humanity subjected to austerity and its justifications, proliferation of pollutants met only with fake environmentalist concern, the persistence, and indeed global extension of workplace ‘alienation’ viewed as nostalgia, deskilling/desktop killing for everyone, not just the ruling class – all this seems to generalise a lumpen character.

Maintain the reserve army and keep us all in fatigues seems the only strategy capital has in this crisis. Besides scrambling for a cut of course, and a crazy generous cut at that. Snouts in the trough, but keeping us all in the sty. Some are more in the mud than others, some are bacon, most are fed on swill – oink oink. The uniformed ones collaborate with the omnipresent butcher. Some are tagged with an RFID chip on their ear. Higgledy po.